Burger Flippers of the World, Unite! The Drive to Unionize Fast-Food Workers

I begrudge no one their right to organize and join a union if they so choose. But these poor schlubs are being led down a primrose path to unemployment if they think that a burger or pizza joint can stay in business long if the workers are earning $15 an hour.

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States.

The campaign — backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union — has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city.

Leaders of the effort said that workers were walking off the job to protest what they said were low wages and retaliation against several workers who have backed the unionization campaign. They said it would be the first multi-restaurant strike by fast-food workers in American history, although it was unclear how many workers would walk off the job.

I don’t envy people who work in fast-food restaurants, but neither do I feel sorry for them. Life is full of choices. Nobody is forcing anyone to work at McDonald’s. If you want something better, you have to better yourself. You have better your skills to make yourself more employable in higher-paying, higher-skilled positions.

Unless you’re an actor:

Raymond Lopez, 21, an aspiring actor who has worked at the McDonald’s for more than two years, showed up on his day off to protest. “In this job having a union would really be a dream come true,” said Mr. Lopez, who added that he makes $8.75 an hour. He said that he, and fellow fast-food workers, were under-compensated. “We don’t get paid for what we do,” he said. “It really is living in poverty.”

Au contraire, Mr. Lopez. You get paid exactly for what you do — a job that any 15 year old can perform with three days training. If you can organize a union under the trying circumstances of massive turnover and generally apathetic workers, I wish you the best.

McDonald’s took the high road:

McDonald’s issued a statement about the incipient unionization push. “McDonald’s values our employees and has consistently remained committed to them, so in turn they can provide quality service to our customers,” the company said.

It added that the company had an “an open dialogue with our employees” and always encouraged them to express any concerns “so we can continue to be an even better employer.” McDonald’s noted that most of its restaurants were owned and operated by franchisees “who offer pay and benefits competitive within the” industry.

What would a Big Mac cost if the workers were earning $15 an hour with union health care and other benefits? No doubt there are regional variations in price, but in my neck of the woods, a Big Mac is $3.79 and a Whopper is $4.89. So figure a $7 Big Mac and $8 Whopper if workers at my local burger joints unionize. At those prices, I’d go to a nice sit-down restaurant and get decent service. And I doubt that too many harried working mothers would spend $25-$30 a few times a month taking their kids out for a fast-food treat.

It may be less — if management cuts back on the workforce and many workers’ dreams of making $15 an hour end up on the sidewalk. And there would be a big push to automate a lot of jobs now performed by humans. Many full-time workers would be moved to part-time and the pace of franchise openings would slow considerably.

And how “fast” would “fast food” really be in a union shop? Moving people in and out in the least amount of time has a hefty impact on profit margins. Work rules that would slow that process down and affect productivity would lead to smaller profits and fewer new hires for the franchisee.

There is no doubt that some people are forced by lack of education, skill, intelligence, or ambition to work in a fast-food restaurant. But these jobs were never meant to be careers. At best, they work as entry-level jobs for kids and young adults. They teach them life skills that will hold them in good stead when they are ready to go out in the world and get a “real” job.

Unionization will destroy these opportunities for teens, as most of those jobs will go to adults who need the union wages to stay out of the poor house. What is gained by paying a “living wage” to low-skilled, unmotivated workers will be lost on the other end when young people first starting out find opportunities to learn how to work closed to them.

Rick Moran is PJ Media's Chicago editor and Blog editor at The American Thinker. His own blog is Right Wing Nut House.

103 Comments, 36 Threads

While I believe that labor unions are nothing more than criminal gangs and should be banned outright, I have to disagree with this statement:

“I don’t envy people who work in fast food restaurants, but neither do I feel sorry for them. Life is full of choices. Nobody is forcing anyone to work at McDonalds. If you want something better, you have to better yourself, better your skills to make yourself more employable in higher paying, higher skilled positions.”

Uh…no.

I work as a cashier because that’s all I can find these days, on account of Obamacare and the Obamaconomy. I have quite an impressive education and resume, recently updated IT skills (and other skills as well), along with a clean record, good references, you name it. Problem is, I’m nearly sixty and nobody wants to take the risk of giving me a full-time job where they’d have to pay for my insurance. The upshot is that we are making plans to emigrate.

Mr. Sellers, how old are you? Do you have a job that pays well? Are you retired? Just what do you do to earn an income? Are you on Social Security and Medicare?

The gentleman made a good point about age in America. Once you pass the age of 50, if you are a white male, your choices diminish to the point where flipping burgers may be the only option available for employment.

I am extremely fortunate because at the age of 69, I still have a small consulting business with a few clients who cannot afford to pay the expenses of an office and the overhead required. However, not everyone is as fortunate and the honest, hard working white males who are now portrayed as virtual lepers in a world dominated by social engineering sycophants have to seek employment where they can.

When you have had door after door slammed in your face once they see your white skin and gray hair, it is discouraging to say the least. Your response is typical of jerks who haven’t faced the fact that this country is no longer what it once was. Find a job indeed!

Now, it the fast food industry unionizes, you can bet the thousands of fast food restaurants across the country will start to close their doors due to lack of business. Thousands of employees will no longer have a job and more and more will go on welfare, creating an even greater burden on services and costs will increase therefore requiring an increase in taxes on fewer and fewer working people.

Yeah, laugh your ass off dude. Get back to us when you are faced with the same situation and have to take what work you can find.

The guy above has a point. It’s next to impossible to find a serious job if you are above a certain age in this economy. Certain age groups are really taking it in the shorts and the older workers are one such group. Now, the person above might have some better luck if he applied to a state like South Dakota where they are having problems finding qualified workers for some jobs, but that’s still highly dependent on what his skill-set is and how many he’s competing against for the openings in his skill set. Last I checked, on of those problem areas was prison guard, for example, and a 60-year-old is likely not physically fot enough for that job.

I was denied a job that I was perfectly capable of doing (installing networks and running cable) because the bigwigs didn’t think I was up to the task – mostly because THEY would not have been up to the task. It would have involved going into crawl spaces (I’m not a big person, so that wouldn’t have been a problem) and climbing ladders (carrying fairly lightweight objects, no heavy lifting).

Actually I’m an older white female. I have been looking for work for over four years. In all this time I have been offered exactly ONE job and that’s where I am now.

We haven’t made a final decision on where to go but we have several possibilities in mind.

One possibility is Russia – which despite the bigoted rantings of Kim Zigfeld a/k/a La Russophobe on PJM, truly is a free country for anybody who wants to do the normal things that human beings want to do, such as work and keep a reasonable portion of your income, start a business, raise a family, worship in peace, and so forth. It is NOT free for those lunatics who want to abuse their liberties with the purpose of making Russia into a train wreck.

I wish you well. I would choose Poland for myself. Been there a few times and enjoyed it very much. The people are great, and I would be happy working in a country that is trying to improve itself, as opposed to what is going on here.

Mr. Sellers, I lost my very well paying job in 2009, at the height of the recession. I was 60 years old at the time, filled out every application for employment I could find, distributed my considerable resume all over the state, ended up with not one interview, and lost my home. If you think being unemployed, through no fault of your own, is a laughing matter, all I have to say to you is I’m sure your day is coming, and good luck when it happens to you. I don’t agree that the restaurant workers should be making $15 per hour, when college graduates are now being asked to do jobs that were previously paid at above $20 per hour, for $10 or $11 per hour, but I’m not laughing at them either. I try to be nice when commenting to other posts, but people like you make it extremely difficult!

I also am in my 60′s without my house being paid off and with a thin retirement fund. I had considerable equity in my house and planned to downsize into something that would then be paid off. But then the bursting housing bubble scrubbed away most of that equity.

At 60 I planned to work my last 5 years until retirement at which time I would have been fine. Instead my company had some layoffs due to the crashing economy and I had to use up part of my retirement fund to live since then. Also had to help 2 family members in even worse situations due to the same issues.

I have a statement showing how much I paid in State, Federal and SS taxes over my career. If I could just get a third of the taxes back, I would be sitting pretty as they say. I am sure over the years the government lost at least a third of what they have confiscated to waste and fraud. As for social security, I will never receive in SS payments what I put in unless I live until I am 120.

So Mr. Cool, it must be great to be doing well and as for your smug and self congratulatory comments, I wouldn’t want to have a beer with you. And oh by the way, Obama will find a way to get it your 401K and to deny your heirs their inheritance. Hoping to hear from you then.

Sellers, I lost my business and my job through no fault of my own, and became unemployed for the first time in my life. It was an eye-opening experience, perhaps one you should have, before criticizing.

While I never treated unemployed people badly, I was astonished to find that many do! Don’t judge anyone until you have walked a mile in their shoes.

BTW, I eventually found a job managing a fast-food restaurant. It is not nearly as easy as you might think.

As I entered my 50′s, work became harder for me to find also. I was once told, candidly, by employers not much younger, that they didn’t think I could keep up with the work load. I had three different jobs at the time to keep me from losing my house and living on the street in a station wagon.
What ever happened to the “experience required” qualification?
And unions don’t make any difference when you are an older worker. They don’t care about your experience or skills either.

1389; With tech experience like yours, you should be able to start a business on the side. I know a few people in tech and software development, and they are not happy with their situations either. They’re looking to move. And once they move, one of the first things they’ll do, is keep their ear to the ground for other opportunities.
How many burger baggers get a gold watch when they retire from a life long career at “Grandmas Drive Thru Diner”?

But, maybe a disgruntled voters union; At 50 cents a month union dues, that adds up to big money!
I’ll have to put some thought into that.

My experience was mostly in larger computer systems. I recently got retrained for network administration, but couldn’t find work because younger workers already had experience in the field and I didn’t.

Everybody and his brother is trying to get freelance web development work. One of my fellow retail clerks had a degree in web design.

Freelance work doesn’t give you steady income, nor does it pay enough to afford insurance.

An old friend (MBA with Six Sigma & in their 40′s) and his wife had to sell their house and move from the east coast to the west coast for any job opportunities, since most of the employers were based in that area, and they would not pay for any relocation expenses. Especially when there is real estate involved.
Once he moved, he got employed within a couple months.
There are government positions available and usually require relocation. And many of these cover some relocation expenses.

Are there any moderators on this site to keep these scam artists from plying their trade? Maybe 1 out of 1,000 make a living by doing something like this at home. But, when the economy is in the toilet and you need a job, it is easy to be suckered into a dead end that ends up costing you more than you will ever make.

See? Like the article says, you are choosing to make a move to better yourself. As all other low paid workers are FREE TO DO.
Don’t like the job? LEAVE. Forcing the employer pay you more than the job is worth is insane and should be illegal.

I hear you. At 50+ (with an MBA) it took a long time to find work at a livable wage. That being said, our situation is not the same as an up-and-coming 21 year old. If I had to venture a guess, I would guess that the aspiring actor keeps this job because it provides the flexibility to pursue other goals. If he was serious about finding work that pays better, there are better jobs available.

Try UPS. I’m serious, they’re not just truck drivers (you have to work up to that anyway, and the waiting list is 3 years, more or less.) They have a VERY wide number of possible jobs and careers, everything from mechanics to pilots! And they are a very large employer worldwide, so the chances of being hired are much better than other companies. Only problem is that many of the careers are hired from within the company, but not all. Check it out: http://www.upsjobs.com (no I do not work for them but I LOVE the company, and my son does work for them.)

Actually, my point of view will differ significantly from most on here. I wouldn’t lose a second of sleep if every restaurant ‘chain’ or any other kind of ‘chain’ was run out of business by anybody — even the labor unions. We need a full return of small mom & pop businesses or small family corps running the businesses in our communities once more. And yes, there are simple solutions to the ‘buying power’ arguments supporting the big corps.

Heck, watch Food networks “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” to see how the small innovative independent restaurants pack people in at very reasonable prices in all kinds of communities across america.

Most consolidated and centralized national corporations and conglomerates kill the once successful American tradition of free and competitive enterprise and can destabilize the national economy. Of course the political social transformers and Wall Street wouldn’t like such return of community owned free enterprise very much.

I’m personally a fan of smaller cafes and restaurants. However, sometimes one just wants a quick, cheap bite to eat. Other times, when traveling, you want something you know and trust. That little Mom & Pop diner might just be the topic of next weeks “Kitchen Nightmares”…

I hear that. I hadn’t included the equation of todays generations that are happy living and working in a pigs environment. Guess I shouldn’t use pigs as example since they live in mostly clean or sterile environments anymore.

But again, being a small free and competitive enterprise you shouldn’t expect to escape the warning(s) before a red tag is put on the front door of your filthy restaurant. Every county should have a supervising inspector and a flock of hard nosed parttime inspectors who rotate their areas of inspection on a monthly basis.

Stop whining about the evil coporations, 75 percent of all business in this country is “SMALL” business. and many if not most of the fast food restaurants are franchises owned by, you guessed it, small business owners. I am so sick of people like you who attack everything the made this country great. BTW Ray Crock started MacDonalds as a small Business, KFC was Col. Sanders who taught Dave of Wendy’s fame ect Starbucks get the picture

You miss every valid point being made. A franchise ‘owner’ is nothing more than a “corporate manager” for however many franchise units he/she may have paid to operate. You have obviously never been a fanchisee or you would not have the opinions you have. For example you cannot make anything more than ‘maybe’ an average wage if you own only a single franchise unit of anything.

Your average next door neighbor cannot be wrting speeding tickets one day and be a McDondalds franchise owner the next day. Franchise owners are not your average next door mom and pop small business owners of sadies bugers last week. These days only the more wealthy persons of a community or a groups of wealthy in a community who form an investment group, are franchise owners.

As a franchisee you don’t own the name, you rarely own the equipment and rarely own the building. You not only have to have an impecable credit and relative employment history but you have to have a huge out front amount of clear capital to invest in the franchise and usually at least 90 days of liquid operating capital to start. If successful, you then operate your franchise in strick accordance to the corporate operating and procedures manual. EVERYTHING is dictated by the parent corpration! After all the continuing franchise fees, the gross profit margins are super thin and the net profit even thinner.

Few franchees survive! If you have the capital to buy into ‘multiple units’ of say a McDonalds, Wendy’s, BK, and have the optimum management skills, you have a better chance to succeed with a decent ROI. Same thing applies to most every other kind of franchise operations. Few things in life are ever what they appear to be on the surface.

If the restaurant workers unionize, they will represent all the restaurant workers across all the restaurants, including small diners. Mom and pop aren’t going to have much of a prayer against big labor.

Unfortunately, mom & pop shops will also come under pressure to unionize, and they will have little ability to resist, especially when unions deploy “goons” such as those who work for the UAW. So they’ll close and then ONLY national chains with the will and money to thwart such activities will remain. Any decent mom & pop restaurant has no trouble packing in customers, anyhow. We have a local taco joint that is so popular that they have opened two satellite shops here in a city of 30,000 just to handle the load. I love their tacos and other “Tex/Mex” food and I am not alone. They are 2d generation Nigerians, by the way. The best pizza place in town is ran by a Polish couple who immigrated 40 years ago. They have put their own kids and grandkids through college with the shop, and paid wages allowing generations of other kids to make it through college was well. Really good, mom & pop restaurants will flourish over the burger-clone chains every time as they offer quality and can change menu items very quickly; whereas the Golden Arches requires a year and a half, 500 senior management meetings and a cost-analysis study to decide whether or not to add an extra pickle slice to a Big Mac.

I know how to cook… I can flip my own burgers… What I want to see is a law requiring any business to post what unions are affiliated with their business. So I can avoid giving those businesses, and by extension unions, any money.

I know… it’ll never happen. But, it is a nice dream. Helluva way to bust unions… right at the consumer level.

From what I’ve seen if the workmanship is shoddy and the product overpriced, and the employees rude and apathetic, it’s probably unionized. A union worker can often be like a broken gun- won’t work and can’t be fired.

Perfect timing on the 400/hr custom hamburger making machine. It will require a well-trained (and likely well-paid) technician and someone to ensure that food components are made available. Unionization of fast-food workforces might actually accelerate development and deployment of new technologies.

McDonalds has already tested automation for ordering and other tasks. Should the unions win, you can expect them to adopt enough automation to allow them to operate a restaurant with an absolute minimum of employees. There’s a reason why most construction companies don’t hire a lot of manual ditch diggers any more. One skilled operator with a backhoe can do the work of dozens of manual ditch diggers.

As a side note: because of the increased pressure from delightful groups like the UFW (United Farm Workers) and the Teamsters Farm Workers, we mechanized harvesting grapes for wine and raisins. It works pretty well and we don’t have to hire a large crew to harvest our grapes. I’ll give the unions one “pat on the back”, they have certainly motivated industries to mechanize their operations. Have you seen the increased wide spread use of robots for in the automotive industry? Where I worked (dried fruit) before I retired, our packaging floor has more and more robotic equipment every year. The unions have driven businesses into upgrading and increasing their efficiency. Good on ‘em.

Remember when Obama complained about ATMs costing bank tellers their jobs? Don’t be surprised if this economic ‘genius’ tries to outlaw automation in favor of manual labor as an effort to create jobs. From his (and the unions’) perspective, better to have dozens of manual ditch diggers than one guy on a backhoe. What could possibly go wrong?

I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen an ATM-like machine at fast food joints. Walk up, push a few buttons, swipe your card, and move to the side to wait for the order to be ready. Hell, even add an iPhone and Droid app to do it before you even get there!

I actually used one at a Boloco burrito place yesterday. I’ve never had my order taken by a person there. I swipe my credit card, pick what I want and walk over to the pickup area to wait for them to call my number. They do have a lot of people working there, but it’s mostly in putting your food together. Automation is already here.

Just another jump down the road to socialism. McDonald’s will probably turn out like General Motors if it is unionized and then we’ll have to bail them out to keep their union workers happy. The circle of life for the Democrats continues (create a union and then force its members to pay dues which are given to the Democratic Party).

If and when unions dominate all sectors of our economy, it will actually begin to undermine the benefits of being a union member. Currently, pay that exceeds the worker’s value to the employer and lower productivity expectations(the raison d’etre of unions) does provide a better life for union members but that is only because the rest of us do not get those things. When most of us are unionized, then all goods and services will be shoddier and more costly and this will offset in real terms any wage gains or lifestyle gains that the unions secure for their members. We end up being Cuba or the USSR in the 80′s. This is not a theory – it is human nature combined with mathematics.

Unfortunately the union bosses and activists and their bought-and-paid-for politicians will never be called on the carpet for the harm they will have caused. And they will never get to hear their descendants cursing them.

This “organized effort” doesn’t have anything to do with the plight of the poor schlubs that work for fast food joints.

It is a community agitator proxy flap that has everything to do with the continuing takeover of domestic labor, corporate management and government by the illegal Hispanics.

American kids cannot find a job in these places anymore and the fast food chain management core is either Hispanic or selectively placed minorities that serve to the pleasure of organized labor groups that intend to take over full control of the United States of America by the time they are done.

$15.00 an hour plus welfare, food stamps, SSI and everything you can steal is a sweet deal for “workers” that don’t give a tinker’s damn about our country.

Can you say give me 2 burgers, hold the onions and less ice in the soda pop in Spanish? Good luck in getting what you want right now if you can’t.

Not very healthy no doubt, but still decent when you are in a hurry and don’t want a burger – and the sweet tea is great!

There is one located only a few miles from my home that literally had almost nothing but hispanics working there at one point. It started off with a few, then eventually there were no workers there except maybe the manager who were native speakers of the English language. All of the rest were jabbering away in spanish.

My order was NEVER right and I started visiting that franchise less and less.

As the economy imploded, I noticed a lot of hispanics disappearing from these parts and suddenly I started seeing younger, local teenaged workers in that franchise.

Whadyaknow – suddenly my orders were being filled out correctly! And wonder of wonders, Americans were doing jobs that they had previously been accused of not wanting to do!

This is the kind of change I can get behind.

These types of jobs should NEVER be considered a ‘career’ necessitating a ‘living wage’. They should be considered starter jobs that teach teenagers a proper working mindset to support themselves in the future.

When immigrants move in and overwhelm such jobs, those teenagers lose that opportunity. As a result, society then begins to moan about how teenagers don’t have any kind of work ethic.

How can they learn a work ethic if they can’t get a job?

Having the unions move into these franchises will have a worse effect. Human nature is such that most people hit a certain comfort level and then don’t push themselves any harder to succeed. Unionization tends to foster this kind of attitude.

Only instead of migrants who return to Mexico when the economy doesn’t suit them anymore, you have locals who end up seriously lacking in motivation to improve their lives any further than necessary.

After all, why get an education or work harder to try to improve your lot in this world when you can get a ‘living wage’ flipping burgers, and if your employer doesn’t like your work ethic then tough luck to them trying to get rid of you when the union steps in.

At least with migrants things are more responsive to economic pressures, whereas with unions it ends up being permanent stagnation.

p.s. Its not about the $8.75. Everyone’s paycheck must first be laundered by all of our GOVERNMENTS.Government is FAT because they HOG too much of the pie.santa-bama has dreams of becoming 500lbs.Your paycheck is like stale bread thrown out the window,and GOVERNMENT IS THE PIGEONS!

When traveling, my friend and I tend to look for a Cracker Barrel. At higher prices the only reason to eat at fast food establishments would be time constraints.
As for dinner, I make my own meals at home. The prices necessitated by a $15 minimum wage would make home-cooking that much more attractive. If I really want fast food, I can buy a Stouffer’s entree on sale for less than the cost of a ‘value meal’.

It depends on how far the union goes. Inflation has been happening without the latest union thuggery. If the price of everything goes up, it goes up everywhere. With or without inflation, I can get food on sale for less than the cost of the value meal at a fast food restaurant.

Cracker Barrel – you can’t even get a glass of wine (or beer) with a meal. The first (and only) time I went into one (after being told it was good), I learned as I ordered the place was as Teetotal as my 100 year old grandmother. Uncivilized.

You can’t get wine or beer at McDonald’s either. Does that discourage your going there for a bite? I don’t go to CB looking for wine. CB is for road trips. Notice, they’re usually right off an interstate. You can get breakfast, lunch or dinner. When I’m driving long hours, alcohol isn’t an option. Time for that when I get to my destination. Again, on road trips, the only reason to go to Mickey D or BK is to save time. In and out in under half an hour, which can’t be done in a place with table service.

Our new currency will be food stamps. The only people that will be eating at fast food restaurants will be the obese, food stamp carrying entitlement public. I’ve never been a fan of “fast food” and this is just one more reason to not do business with them.

Go for it lemmings, this is why you reelected the great divider, he will back you to the demise of your industry.

My wife works for a unionized grocery store. It’s tough competing with non-union competitors. Costs are high, partially because they can’t get rid of the dead weight. My wife would easily make as much, if not more money had she been working for a non-unionized store. The union is the major beneficiary, not the workers.

Does anyone really think a fast food franchise can pay $15 an hour if their competitor pays nine? I don’t know about anyone else but all these burgers are interchangeable to me. I won’t pay 50% more for brand M or W or B.

There is a grocery chain here, Fresh & Easy. One store in particular, is being picketed by a union, all two picketers. I don’t know why they waste their time, the store does a pretty brisk business. Fresh & Easy is based on you doing your own checkout. I guess they could unionize the machines…. I wonder if they require a 10 minute break every 4 hours? Do you suppose the machines get two weeks vacation? How about hospitalization? The unions will eventually destroy business in this country. Lemmings going off a cliff.

I was looking at the plus side; A Congress on strike! They’d have to bargain with the American People. The U.S. government is headed in the same direction as Hostess Brands anyway.
According to my calculations; With the amount it costs to run Congress for one day, they would only have to shut down for 355 days to wipe out the entire debt.
The next time Rubio is asked how old the earth is, he should make that statement in reply.

I’ve seen franchise ‘owners,’ the local guys who pay the bills and write the checks, who owed everything to the bank. Their nice homes, the new cars, all of the credit cards maxed out, the toys in the garage, driveway and basement. They don’t actually own anything outright. They owe it all to the bank. Same/same wrt to the brick and mortar building the franchise is located in. Then, there’s the costs imposed by the franchise, itself. The local guy pays out several thousand dollars a month, just because the company’s name is on the building, just to begin with. They can’t afford to give their employees living-wage pay raises, even if they want to. Throw in compliance with fed, state and local regulations and laws, including tax after fee after permit after tax. All the business income goes to the bank to pay off their debts or to txes and fees of one kind or another.

Those government taxes and fees and compliance costs are much higher than most people think they are. If those were slashed, the employees might get a higher wage. Personally, in our current society, if you slashed government taxes and fees, I think the franchise ‘owner’ would get even more personal loans and spend more money he doesn’t have to buy more stuff he doesn’t own. Meanwhile, the kids and people working at his local brick and mortar get paid squat and are often treated worse than you treat your pets.

Unionize the burger flippers? It’s their only hope of getting a decent wage…but, in the end, it’ll shut down a lot of local franchises, too.

The issue is more complex than many conservatives seem to think.

The problem I have here, is that conservatives say their the party of small government, but the first thing they look at in this scenario is not the government imposed costs of doing business. They poor disdain upon American citizens who trying to earn an income (what could be more American than earning an income) or on the unions who take advatage of the situation.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve read countless conservatives complaining about the cost of regulations and the size of government. Those are valid complaints. According to an estimate I read several years ago, some 40-60% of the cost of everything we buy can be traced to regulatory compliance and business taxes. We then pay taxes on the higher prices caused by the taxes and regulations. Such a system!

Who says we don’t think the costs of regulation are too high. Over regulation is one of the biggest blights on the economy along with unionization.

But this article isn’t about regulations being too onerous. It’s about unions trying to drive the cost of labor up drastically because burger flippers think that their labor is worth far more than it is.

Basic economics dictates that your labor is worth precisely as much as you and your employer agree it is worth modified by the number of other people who are also able to do the same work you are agreeing to do. The more people who can be do what you do necessarily means that your labor will be worth less because inevitably, the more people there are who do what you are agreeing to do, the more likely it will be that at least one of those people will want to work badly enough to agree to do the job for less than you are agreeing to do it, driving the cost of labor down.

All a union is is a group of laborers attempting to collude to artifically force the price of their labor higher by imposing a false price for their labor by keeping all other competitors out of their labor market. Now, they could theoretically still be undercut by someone outside the union who will work for less, but they have managed to get their extortion backed by force of law, making it illegal for anyone outside their union collusion to work for any employer.

Regulations can be addressed in another article, but they are as onerous in their own way.

Conservatives are the folks who have been screaming about the cost that is being imposed by ObamaCare. Those compliance costs will dwarf – for small hospitality businesses – all other regulatory cost. You and your ilk are the folks who told us “we have to pass this to find out what’s in it”.

What will happen across the hospitality industry (and others, but the article is about hospitality) in the next 12 months will be an eyeopener for you. Employees will be limited to 29 hours per week. In smaller businesses – think franchisees – where the number of employees exceeds 50, you’re going to see the owners forming multiple independent business units and limiting each unit to 49 employees or less.

You can kiss off the “living wage” argument, the question for low-skill workers will become “how many jobs can I find?”.

Insult someone who agrees with you more often than not…and expect them to vote for your policies and politicians? Yeah, like that’s a winning strategy.

I might know more than you seem to think…mebbe…possibly… I could actually have some small amount of experience in the area in question. Mebbe I’m just speaking from experience or something.

The idea that someone else may know something you don’t, or may have understood something you’ve overlooked, sems to be an impossible concept for folks like you to grasp. (Your ideological opponents have much the same problem.) Any argument you don’t already accept is…specious…not worth talking about….or else it’s presented by an ignorant man. ‘Cause you already know and understand all there is to know about all there is to know.

It’s a theater of the absurd. It might even be humorous, if it weren’t so tragic.

You say: “The idea that someone else may know something you don’t, or may have understood something you have overlooked, seems to be an impossible concept for folks like you to grasp. (Your ideological opponents have much the same problem.) Any argument you don’t already accept is…specious…not worth talking about….or else it’s presented by an ignorant man. ‘Cause you already know and understand all there is to know about all there is to know.”

Dude, how pathetically unaware you are. This is exactly what we think of you guys! This is why we have such contentious political climate. This is why government needs to be severely limited – just like the founding fathers designed it to be – so that one side doesn’t get to have any life altering impact on the other just because they are “sure” they are right. We shouldn’t have to defend our right to be left alone but that is what you are doing to us. The burden of proof is on you. If you and your government want our money, property and to restrict us beyond a certain minimum upon which we all can agree, you need to get us to do it voluntarily – not by coercion of unions, regulations and taxation. This apparently is “an impossible concept for folks like you to grasp”

Opening a restaurant is one of the riskiest business decisions you can make. While the failure rate for a McDonald’s franchisee is pretty low, for restaurants in general it’s very high. That means they aren’t making enough to stay in business already. All raising labor costs will do is drive the restaurant to cut the number of employees, raise prices to meet the higher costs and/or go out of business. When you raise the price of something, people tend to buy less of it. That’s true for fast food and unskilled labor alike.

Do some homework. Go to McDonalds website and check out what it takes to open a franchise. Bottom line: significant business experience, the ability to develop and execute a business plan, good to excellent credit and a minimum – could be significantly more – of $300,000 in liquid assets to invest on day one. Add to that the requirement of cash reserves to cover your start up period and you’ve got a very significant personal investment. In a metro area that can easily be $1,000,000. For a fast food restaurant, with no guarantee on your return.

You want businessmen who make this kind of investment – not to mention the time commitment, which may easily run to 80 hours per week for the foreseeable future – to “take a little less”.

In a word: no.

And note, restaurant operators don’t refer to their employees as “poor schlubs” that was the author and he was using pointed language to drive home the fact that the people we’re talking about are employees who require no particular education or training beyond a couple of days on-site. You don’t live in anything that looks like the real world.

(Yea; I know I’m posting comments too fast; Get some speed reading lessons.)
The cost of eating during the work day is getting more expensive for everybody, EXCEPT CONGRESS.
Do a search of the Congressional Cafeteria and look at what they are being served every day they are in session.
At one venue at least, they have a carving station EVERY DAY.
And make sure you check out how cheap they get all this opulent cuisine.

” A burger or pizza joint can’t stay in business long if the workers are earning $15 an hour.”

Then GTFO of business. I’m tired of having to subsidize your workers’ health care because you’re a greedy bastard. No wonder America voted against you. You’re nothing but a bunch of penny-pinching sociopaths.

Right on. How about eliminating the minimum wage and the 40 hour week? Seriously. In this environment, small changes won’t fix it. We can always screw it up again. People want to work let them work anyway they want to work or can. Cut back on unemployment, tailor back food stamps or go back to govt. stores. Costs will drop, employment will go up, basements will empty. Old folks can maybe find a little honor again if they want to work.

Here is one of the bigger reasons we are in the dire straights were in now. Unions Suck! But lets get those burger flippers $15 an hour because its such a highly educational and complicated and skilled thing to know how to do. Again….everyone thinks they should be paid top dollar for nothing. Sick of this entitlement crap!

If most people were raised, an in turn raised their children to understand that burgers were a treat and not a diet, most fast food joints would have never been opened.
And enough of this calling people Nazis. 99.9% of the population don’t even know where the word Nazi comes from. And no, it isn’t from the acronym NSDAP.

Wow, Why would anyone care to know the origin of the name of,one of many, nefarious groups of murderers in history? Do I need to name them? Or is it more important to remember them and what they did? The One may be the next one. What with all the bullets purchased that can’t be used in wars by the Feds.. And the FEMA/black prisons in thirty some States. Get some perspective, please.

Please note that Pelosi’s Tuna processing holdings are there, and she didnt grant those poor sods a living wage, but rather less than half the minimum wage of the US states. Which begs the question, if a lower minimum wage is good for the Samoans, then why are all the states mandated by the Feds to have the same minimum wage? The answer is to prevent business from moving or locating in the American South. It’s a Northern/Union jobs protection scheme….as the Davis Bacon act always was and is.

When you pay someone $15 per hour it costs well over $15. I had one laborer I paid $14 per hour. After employer portion of FICA, disability insurance, unemployment insurance (which went way up due to extending UI benefits to almost forever), workman’s comp, liability insurance, etc… the actual cost per hour was over $21.

When government steps in to offer all sorts of protections for workers, those protections are not ‘free’. There is a price to paid. When that price gets high enough, products and services will become unaffordable, or they will be provided by the black market economy. Tax cheating will become an art form and illegals will become preferred.

Businesses have to pay enough to allow their workers to live. If they don’t, government programs will have to step in to make up the difference between private wages and what is necessary to survive—the alternative to that is Somalia, which only you guys think of as a paradise. Of course the programs that subsidize underpaid workers are funded by taxpayers; but since our politics started moving right in the 70s, more and more of this tax is paid by what remains of the middle class. And that’s the basis of the Walmart/McDonald’s scam. The big corporations get subsidized by middling people, who don’t bitch because the likes of you convince them that the real enemies are the working poor. A utopian situation if you are on top.

“Businesses have to pay enough to allow their workers to live. If they don’t, government programs will have to step in to make up the difference between private wages and what is necessary to survive…”

Businesses in America should be driven by free enterprise competitiveness not fear of the government stepping in. Your suggestion is democtratic socialism by any definition.

Inflation is ‘arbitrarily’ driven by the stupidty of most Americans. Just to give you an example. Twelve dollars today has the very same buying power as $1.43 in 1956.